THE BLEEDING CHALICE.

Ben Counter.

IT IS THE 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the G.o.ds, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carca.s.s writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

YET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds.

Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the s.p.a.ce Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mcchanicus to name only a few. But for all their mult.i.tudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untoldbillions. It is to live in the cruellest and most b.l.o.o.d.y regime imaginable. These are the talcs of those times.

Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting G.o.ds.

ONE.

The years lay so heavily on the corridors of the Librarium Terra that the very air was thick with age. The endless tottering rows of bookcases and verdi-grised datastacks seemed chained down by the weight of the thousands upon thousands of years of history. The librarium was deep within the planet's crust but even som the indistinct hum of activity droned through the labyrinthine corridors, just as it did everywhere else on the holy hive world of Terra. It was the sound of billions of souls grinding their way through the bureaucracy that kept the Imperium of Man together.

Even the captain of the deletions unit felt the sheer importance of the information that filled the librarium.

He had lived on Terra all his life, immersed in the endless repet.i.tion of the myriad tasks that made up the government of the Imperium. He had done his job since birth, just as his forebears had done, and the shadows beneath Terra comprised his whole world.

But even he, after the decades spent performing his thankless task, had some instinctive under-standing that the Librarium Terra held a repository of particularly pure, dangerous history.

The captain glanced around the next corner. The gallery he saw was lined with shelves of books so old they were little more than banks of rotting paper, lit by yellowed glow-globes that picked out the faint silver spider's webs that had been there, undisturbed, for as long as some of the books.

No one knew the full layout of the Librarium Terra. Estimates of its size varied, as no one had been to its furthest extents and returned - the dele-tions team had taken three days of forced marching to get this far.

But, by the best estimates of the adepts who gave the unit its orders, the objective was close by.

The captain waved his ten-strong unit forwards. They wore black bodysuits with hoods that left only the eyes visible, rebreathers built in to keep aeons of dust out of their lungs. Their gloved hands held narrow-nozzled flamers connected to fuel can-isters on their belts. But the captain carried a silenced autogun with a flaring flash suppressor. They moved quickly and almost silently, each one covering the other. They had always been members of the same unit, just as the captain had always commanded them. The captain didn't need to actu-ally give them orders - they just did as they had always done, as generations had done in the endless predator's game beneath Terra.

The captain hurried down the gallery until it opened onto a landing overlooking a tangled knot of bookcases and datastacks. The cases held huge leather-bound volumes, tarnished infoslates, crum-bling scrolls and reams of parchments, crammed onto shelves that had collapsed here and there into drifts of tattered paper.

The datastacks, blocks of smooth black crystalline material that could store remarkable amounts of information, ranged from sinister glossy black obelisks to elaborate info-altars covered in filigree decoration and crowned with cl.u.s.ters of statues. Several of them bore images of the Adeptus Astartes, the armour-clad s.p.a.ce Marines who formed the elite of the Imperium's armed forces, battling aliens and corruption across the distant stars.

The captain peered into the gloom that flooded the labyrinth below. He spotted movement - a scholar worked in an alcove formed by the cases. Surrounded by discarded books he was leafing rapidly through another. His face was incredibly wizened and his arms had been replaced with jointed metal armatures that flicked through the book's pages with incredible speed. The scholar could have been a servitor, a mind-wiped automa-ton that was human only in the sense that it was formed from a rebooted human brain. Or it could have been a sentient human, a loyal servant of Terra like the captain himself, acting out some task that was probably redundant and meaningless but which represented the loyalty of everyone on Terra to the immortal G.o.d-Emperor.

The captain raised his autogun close to his face and focused on the hairless, tight-skinned skull of the scholar. The autogun coughed once and the scholar's skull crumpled suddenly as if paper-thin. The body slumped and fell, sprawling against the shelf behind it and disappearing beneath a cascade of books.

There were to be no witnesses to a deletion. That was the way it had always been done. Had the scholar been aware of it, he would have understood why he had to die.The captain vaulted from the balcony down into the shadows below. The rest of the unit followed him, their feet padding on the tarnished wood of the floor as they landed. Down here the air was so heavy with age and knowledge that moving around was like walking through water. The faint, sickly glow from the electro-lanterns dotted here and there served only to make the shadows harder. The captain spotted some t.i.tles and dates on the vol-umes on the shelves. These books held details of the Imperium's armed forces, regimental histories of the Imperial Guard and accounts of long-forgotten battles. The deaths of billions of men were glossed over in those pages, and the captain could almost hear them screaming from the same pages that praised their sacrifice to the Emperor.

A simple hand signal, and the deletions team spread out, each taking a section of bookshelf and pulling out volumes at random, glancing at the cov-ers and contents and then casting them to the floor. A servitor appeared without warning, its deformed splay-fingered hands spinning along the floor in a fruitless attempt to keep it clean. The nearest of the unit turned, sprayed a lance of flame through its vulnerable soft human core, and turned back to his work as the servitor shuddered and died in a burst of sickly smoke.

Another unit member hurried up to the captain. He was holding a book of red leather, its pages edged in gold. On the cover was a raised symbol of glittering black stone - a chalice surrounded by a spiked halo. It was the symbol they had been ordered to look out for.

The captain tapped the nearest deletions trooper on the shoulder. The trooper then tapped the near-est to him, and the signal pa.s.sed through the whole team in a heartbeat. They dropped whatever they were holding and drew their flamers.

They fired plumes of flame into the bookshelves, filling the power-charged air of the Librarium Terra with the stink of flame and smoke. The protective clothing of the team reflected the worst of the heat but the labyrinth was still a furnace, with walls of superheated air billowing between the burning cases.

The captain removed the magazine of his autogun and replaced it with a single round picked from his belt.

He aimed at the closest datastack, which was shaped like a three-panelled altarpiece with its mem-crystal worked into heroic images of battle. The gun fired again, with barely a sound, and the explosive round shattered the crystal into a flood of broken black gla.s.s.

Wordlessly, with an efficiency born of generations of toil, the deletions unit moved through the whole section of the library burning and shattering any-thing that might hold the information they had been ordered to destroy. Already the energy sup-pression drones were hovering in from around every corner, projecting dampener fields that held back the heat of the fires and kept them from spreading. When the team left, the drones would move in and their overlapping fields would smother the flames - but not before the books and datas-tacks were reduced to smoke and ash.

Centuries of history were lost. Whole planets and military campaigns vanished forever from the Imperial memory. But more importantly by far, the deletion order had been carried out, and all official record of the Soul Drinkers Chapter was erased from the history of Mankind.

Like most of the rest of the Imperium, no one really knew when Koris XXIII-3 had been settled. The grey-green, mostly featureless world had sup-ported continent-spanning grox farms for longer than the Administratum could accurately record. The agri-world supported barely ten thousand souls, but was a subtly critical link in the macro economy of the systems that surrounded it, for grox formed a commodity as vital as guns or tanks or clean water.

Grox were huge, lumbering, reptilian, unsanitary and foul-minded. Crucially, however, they were almost entirely edible, each producing a mound of colourless, tasteless, stringy but nutritionally sound processed meat. Without the grox that were lifted from Koris XXIII-3 in vast-bellied cargo ships every three months, the billions of workers and gangers on the nearby hive worlds would starve, riot, and die. The shipyards of half a segmentum would find their human fuel faltering.

The Administratum knew how important the grox were. They administered the agri-world directly, cir-c.u.mventing tax-dodging governors and grafting private enterprise by keeping their own adepts as the sole power and, indeed, the whole population.

Very little of interest happened on Koris XXIII-3, a situation the adepts of the Administratum had worked hard for. The roaming herds of grox and the small islands of adept habitats went centuries with scant incident, the pa.s.sing years marked only by the arrival of the huge dark slabs of the cargo ships and the occasional desultory deaths, births and promo-tions amongst the handful of humans.

So when a ship actually landed at the planet's only s.p.a.ceport at Habitat Epsilon, carrying some-thing otherthan another adept to replace a stampede death, it was a rare event. The ship was small and very, very fast, mostly composed of a clus-ter of flaring engines that tapered to a sharp wedge of a c.o.c.kpit. There were no markings and no ship name, whereas an Administratum ship would bear the stylised alpha of the organisation. Adept Median Vrintas, the highest-ranking adept in the habitat, guessed that the ship carried someone or something important. She quickly donned her black formal Administratum robes and hurried across the meagre, dusty streets of the habitat to greet the ship's occupant.

She didn't know how right she was.

Habitat Epsilon, like every other structure on the planet, was formed of gritty brown rockcrete, pre-moulded and dropped from low orbit. The buildings were ugly and squat, the architecture fea-tureless and windowed with dark reflective gla.s.s that kept the glare of the orange evening sun from the offices, workrooms and tiny living quarters. The s.p.a.ceport was the only feature that made Habitat Epsilon remarkable, a prefabricated circle jutting from the edge of the habitat. There was a small unmanned landing control tower and a few unused maintenance sheds, indicative of how very few ships landed there.

A section of the ship's hull lowered with a faint hiss of hydraulics. Feet tramped down the ramp and three squads of battle-sisters marched out. Sol-diers of the Ecclesiarchy, the church of the Emperor and the spiritual backbone of the Imperium, they wore ornate black power armour that clad them from gorget to foot and carried enough firepower in their boltguns and flamers to reduce the habitat to smoking rubble.

Their leader was more stern-faced than the rest of the Sisters, and old in a way that suggested she was a d.a.m.n good survivor. She bore a huge-bladed power axe. The armour of the Sisters was glossy black with white sleeves and tabards - order and squad markings had been removed.

The sister superior said nothing to Adept Median Vrintas as the Sisters of Battle filed out onto the s.p.a.ceport's ferrocrete surface. They flanked the ship as an honour guard, weapons readied - as if any-thing in Habitat Epsilon could threaten them. Adept Vrintas had heard of the Sisters of Battle, of their legendary faith and skill at arms, but she had never seen one of them in the flesh. Was this some priestly delegation, then? The Missionaria Galaxia, or a confessor come to see to the planet's spiritual health? Vrintas mentally congratulated herself on having the habitat's small Ecclesiarchy temple swept out just three days before.

The next figure to emerge from the ship was a man. He was not particularly tall but his consider-able presence was aided by the carapace armour that covered his torso and upper arms and the floor-length blast-coat of brown leather lined with flakweave plates. His face was long and lined, his jaw p.r.o.nounced and his nose slightly lumpy as if it had been broken and set a few times. His eyes were a curious greyish blue, larger and more expressive than eyes set in that face had a right to be. His black hair was starting to thin. Subtle implants in one temple and behind the ear were for neuro-jacks, simple as far as augmetics went, but far beyond the means of any planet-bound adept. His hands were gloved - one held a data-slate.

He strode past his honour guard of Sisters, glanc-ing at the sister superior with a barely perceptible nod.

The watery sunlight of Koris XXIII-3 glinted off the rings on his free hand, that he wore over the black leather glove. The stiff breeze fluttered the hem of the blastcoat.

'Adept?' he asked as he walked up to Vrintas.

'I am Median Lachrymilla Vrintas, the chief adept of this habitat,' said Vrintas, tingling with the realisa-tion that this visitor must be far, far more important than anyone she had ever met before. 'I oversee the planet's second most productive continent. We have five hundred million head of grox in nine...'

'I am not interested in the grox.' said the stranger. 'I ask only a few hours of your time and access to one of your adepts. There need be minimum dis-ruption to your important work here.'

Vrintas was relieved to see a subtle smile on the man's face. 'Certainly.' she said. 'I shall need to know your name and office, for the records. We can't have just anyone wander around our facilities. And of course you and your colleagues will need to walk through our disinfectant footbaths. There will be quarantine protocols if you wish to leave the habitat as well, so once I know under whose author-ity you are acting...'

The man reached into his blastcoat and took out a small metal box. He flipped open the lid of the box and inside Vrintas saw a stylised T of gleaming ruby in a silver surround. 'Authority of the Emperor's Inquisition.' said the man with the same smile. 'You need not know my name. Now, you will kindly direct me to Adept Diess.'

Inquisitor Thaddeus was an extraordinarily patient man. It was this quality, above all others, that had kept him doing the Inquisition's work when men more violent, or brilliant, or strong-armed had found themselves lacking. The Ordo Hereticus, the branch of the Emperor's Inquisition that rooted out threats amongst the very men and women it was sworn to protect, needed all those qualities. But it also needed the understanding that the Imperium could not be healed of all its sick-nesses at once.It needed men who could see the enormity of a task that stretched well beyond their own lifetimes, and not give way to despair. Thaddeus knew that, as just one man, even with the magnitude of the resources he could command he could do but little in the grand scheme of the Imperium and the divine Emperor's wishes for mankind. At present he had a full company of Ordo Hereticus storm troop-ers and several squads of battle-sisters under Sister Aescarion, but he knew that even with their guns he could not hope to end the corruption and incom-petence that threatened the Imperium from within - just as aliens and daemons threatened from with-out. The whole Inquisition had that responsibility. If the task was ever to be finished, it would be fin-ished by men and women of the Ordo Hereticus, many generations distant.

Thaddeus understood all this, and yet was willing to give his life to the cause, because if he did not, who would?

It was precisely because of his patience that Thad-deus had been given his current task. The first inquisitor to have taken on this mission, a b.l.o.o.d.y-minded and morbidly stubborn soul named Tsouras, had been selected because he happened to be the only one available at that time. He had failed because he had no patience, only a burning deter-mination to win visible triumphs to terrify and amaze those around him.

Tsouras, and inquisitors like him, had their uses, but that mission had not been one of them. When there was time, the lord inquisitors of the Ordo Hereticus had selected Thaddeus to take over, because Thaddeus could suc-ceed by picking away at the layers of lies and confusion until the truth was uncovered before its captors realised.

At that moment, Inquisitor Thaddeus wished he had not been given the mission at all. Though the higher purposes of the Inquisition were burned into his remarkably resilient mind, he was still ulti-mately just a man, and he knew a dead end when he saw it. The few available leads had dried up, and the man now sitting across the untidy desk opposite him was, grim as it sounded, possibly his last hope.

'I do hope I am not inconveniencing you,' said Thaddeus, who never saw any reason to be impolite no matter what his state of mind. 'I understand the importance of the work done here.'

The numbers aren't important.' said Adept Diess. 'I just stamp forms all day' Diess had, until recently, been a fit man, middle-aged but wearing well. Now he had given up on himself and was putting on weight, though he still looked sharper than anyone on this planet had a right to be.

Thaddeus c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. 'You sound as if the Emperor's grox farms do little to inspire you. Median Vrintas would be discouraged to hear that.'

'If you had spent as much time as I have balanc-ing the books for this place, you would know that Median Vrintas can hardly count. She can have her opinions but I keep this planet making the Admin-istratum t.i.thes.'

Thaddeus smiled. 'You speak freely. A rare thing, believe me. Refreshing, in a way.'

'If you have come here to kill me, inquisitor, you will do it no matter what I say. If you have not, you won't waste the bullet.'

Thaddeus sat back in the uncomfortable chair. The other adepts had shown the sense to leave the office before Thaddeus had to ask for them to be removed, so the only sound was the grinding of a cogitator somewhere in the back of the low-ceilinged room. Dust motes floated in the thick light from the setting sun outside.

The office was home to maybe thirty adepts, each at a part.i.tioned workstation. Every wall and surface was covered with paper - statistical printouts, graphs, charts, graphic depictions of the many dis-eases that plagued the common grox, and grim notices reminding the adepts of the ceaseless sacri-fice they were compelled to make for the Imperium. The Administratum tried to foster the same atmos-phere whether it was running a palace or a workhouse - its members dedicated their lives to the work that kept the Imperium running, the unending mundanity of jobs without which the macro economy of the Imperium would collapse.

'You are an intelligent man, adept. Not many men of your station would know an inquisitor when they saw one. Median Vrintas certainly didn't. I have heard men swear blind we don't exist, or that we're all fighting evil G.o.ds and don't bother with the likes of mortals such as yourself. But you seem to know rather more than them. Am I right, consul?'

The adept smiled bitterly. 'I am glad to say I no longer hold that office.'

'I think we understand one another, Consul Senioris Iocanthus Gullyan Kraevik Chloure. You know what I am here to talk about.'

'It's been a long time since anyone called me that.' Ghloure seemed almost nostalgic. 'I could have had command of a whole sector, if I'd just toed the line for a few years more. But, I wanted too much too fast.

You've probably seen it before.'

You understand.' said Thaddeus without chang-ing his tone, 'that Inquisitor Tsouras condemned you to death in your absence.''I a.s.sumed so.' said Chloure. 'How many of the others got out?'

'Not many. Captain Trentius was spared, although he will never pilot anything larger than an escort. A few menials that Tsouras decided were sufficiently minor to be incapable of true incompetence. But most of the rest were executed. I must say, though Tsouras is not the subtlest of my colleagues, you have showed great resourcefulness in evading him for as long as you have.'

Chloure shrugged. 'I planet-hopped for a while. Faked up some references, I talk the talk so there weren't too many questions. I got posted here eventually, and I wasn't intending to go anywhere else. Not many people look on a place like this for a wanted man. At least, I thought so until you turned up.'

'You should know, consul, that you don't do anything in the Administratum without someone writing it down.

Your paper trail was long and winding but I have a.s.sociates who could follow it.'

'Well.' said Chloure. He looked more exhausted than frightened, as if he had always known this day would come and just wanted it over with. 'The Soul Drinkers.'

'Yes. The Soul Drinkers. In light of your coopera-tion, I shall let you begin.'

Chloure sat back and sighed. 'It was three years ago, you know the dates better than I do. Anyway, we had been detailed to take over the Van Skorvold star fort. We knew Callisthenes Van Skorvold had some alien trinket that was particularly valuable. We fed it into a couple of databases and found out it was the Soulspear.'

'The Soul Drinkers artefact?'

'The very same. It was a legend the search turned up, some poem about how it could level cities and kill daemons and such like, and how they'd lost it.' Chloure sat up sharply and leaned across the desk. 'I am a greedy man, inquisitor. I am ambitious. I could have let the Imperial Guard do it but I wanted it finished quicker and cleaner. I know I could have left the Soul Drinkers out of it entirely. If I had just played it by the book I would have saved us all a lot of grief. But like I said, I'm greedy. I mean, we all want something.'

There are far graver sins, consul.' Thaddeus said, with a veneer of understanding that surprised many. 'You let the word go out that you had found the Soulspear. The Soul Drinkers would arrive, elimi-nate all resistance, and take the item, leaving you to march into the star fort unopposed. Is that the case?'

'If it had happened like that I wouldn't be shovel-ling grox dung for the rest of my life. But you know all of this.'

'What can you tell me about Sarpedon?'

Chloure thought for a second. 'Not much. I only saw him on the bridge screen. We had an Adeptus Mechanicus ship with us. They sent a teleport crew into the star fort and s.n.a.t.c.hed the Soulspear right from under Sarpedon's nose.'

Thaddeus could imagine what Sarpedon must have looked like to the gaggle of naval officers and Administratum adepts - a s.p.a.ce Marine comman-der, a psyker, an angry man burning with betrayal.

Chloure was calm, having imagined his final reck-oning with the Inquisition for some time, but even so the fear he must have felt when he first saw Sarpedon played briefly over his face. Were you able to judge his state of mind?' asked Thaddeus. 'His intentions?'

Chloure shook his head. 'I wish I could help you more, inquisitor. He was angry. He was prepared to kill anyone who got in his way, but you know that. You haven't found them, have you? That's why you're here.

Not for me.'

Thaddeus's face betrayed nothing. 'The Soul Drinkers will be found, consul.'

You must be desperate to have gone to the trou-ble of tracking me down. I was just along for the ride, Inquisitor Tsouras was calling the shots and presumably he couldn't help you. What did you think I could tell you?'

Chloure was a sharp man. In many ways he was the first decent adversary Thaddeus had encountered for some time. It was difficult to threaten a man who was perfecdy resigned to his death sentence. He had guessed what Thaddeus was loathe to admit - the Soul Drinkers' trail had turned cold. There were barely any leads left from the debacle at the Cerber-ian Field when Tsouras and the battiefleet, nominally under Chloure's command, had been outfoxed and eluded by the fleet of the renegade s.p.a.ce Marine Chapter.

Sarpedon and his Chapter numbered less than one thousand men, and such a force was barely a speck in the vastness of the Imperium, almost invisible against the boundless galaxy.

Chloure was, in a very real sense, one of Thad-deus's last hopes.

'You are one of the few surviving individuals to have had any contact with the Soul Drinkers.'

continued Thaddeus. 'There is a chance you picked up something that Tsouras did not.'

Chloure smiled, almost in triumph. 'To think that a humble agri-world adept should cause the mightyInquisition such woes! I can only tell you what you already know. Sarpedon won't give up, not ever. He cares for his honour more than his life or those of his men. He'll run if you make him and attack whatever the risks if there's a principle at stake. That's all I know. From the sound of it, that's all anyone knows.'

Thaddeus stood up grandly, letting his blastcoat sweep around him. 'The Inquisition knows where you are, consul. You do the Emperor's work much better here than if you had attained a higher rank, I feel, and for this reason you can consider your exe-cution indefinitely stayed. But should your standards fall, I can ensure the sentence is carried out. We will be watching the t.i.thes with great care.

'So, until then, consider my presence here nonex-istent. Continue the work of the Administratum, Adept Diess.'

The man who had been Consul Senioris Chloure, gave a sardonic salute and returned to the thankless task of sifting through the mountain of forms on his desk.